What a Lovely Way to Burn
by fieldagent85
Summary: During the early stages of her pregnancy, Martha's overactive hormones cause a distinct change in her behavior.


If there is one thing about pregnancy that Martha didn't miss, it was the hormones. It was also one of the few things about her pregnancy that Jonathan _did_ miss.

It started about a week before Ryan came back into their lives. There was no morning sickness, no headaches, no mood swings, and very little sensitivity. Instead, she suddenly found herself dragging Jonathan up to the bedroom in the middle of the day, pushing him into the wall when Clark wasn't looking, waking him up in the early hours of the morning. Jonathan, of course, was in no position to complain and thus never questioned the sudden overactivity of her sex drive. Martha, on the other hand, had suspected something might have been a little off, but she thought perhaps it was simply…seasonal.

About three days into this sporadic burst of randiness, she was at the Luthor mansion, as she usually was during the day. She was going over one of LuthorCorp's recent business acquisitions with Lionel when it hit her again. As she read off the details of the latest small, defenseless business organization to be unwittingly victimized by LuthorCorp, Martha found her thoughts kept involuntarily wandering to inappropriate places. While she was relaying the information about the organization's capital, she was thinking of Jonathan, working in the fields, the hot sun beaming down on him. Lionel asked her about the financial history of the business, and she couldn't help picturing Jonathan in the barn with his shirt off.

Lionel noticed her breathing grow heavier and asked her if she was feeling all right. She was far too distracted to respond coherently, so he took that as a sign that she was _not_ feeling all right and sent her home for the day, the remainder of which she spent out behind the barn with her husband.

Martha went to see Dr. Baker the next morning, thoroughly horrified by her own behavior. It was only menopause, he suspected, nothing to worry about. She shared this notion with Jonathan, who was delighted to find that menopause was not even remotely as bad as the horror stories he had been told – in fact he could've gone for menopause _years_ ago. And as he learned when he walked in on his parents in the hayloft that afternoon, Clark would have greatly preferred that her "menopause" manifest itself the way most cases did – with hot flashes and irritability.

Later that night, long after Clark had gone to bed, Martha and Jonathan laid in each other's arms out on the living floor, recovering from their most recent tryst.

"As of this moment, I have to tell you, I have absolutely no complaints about menopause," Jonathan said, flashing her a flirtatious grin.

She rolled her eyes, snuggling up closer to him, her right hand running up and down his chest lightly. "Yes, you do seem to be enjoying this whole thing quite a bit, don't you?"

Jonathan put a steady hand on top of her roaming hand and squeezed it. "As far as I'm concerned, any time I get to spending lying naked on the living room floor with my beautiful wife is fit to be enjoyed."

Martha lifted her head to look at him and smiled. "I'm not sure Clark would agree if he ventured down here for a midnight snack."

He chuckled. "Yeah, he'd really get an eyeful, wouldn't he?"

"One of these days you're going to get a desperate call from me at work and have to come running in to satisfy me," Martha said, smirking.

"Ah, a booty call," Jonathan laughed, caressing her bare back.

She snorted. "And Lex will find us _en flagrante_ in the study."

"With the candlestick?"

Martha laughed out loud, pulling him closer to her until he was leaning on top of her. She wrapped a leg around his waist, molding their bodies together, and kissed him deeply. "Somehow I think we should probably be having less fun with this," she whispered.

Jonathan wrapped a strong arm around her waist, planting slow, warm, lingering kisses from her neck to her chest as she ran her fingers gently through his hair. She closed her eyes and let out a rapturous sigh, which turned into a longing whimper when his lips reached a sensitive spot. He smiled – he loved that Martha always unconsciously let him know when he was pleasing her.

This brief pause, however, was enough to vaguely bring back her to reality. "Jonathan…" She whispered, a bit dreamily. "You know that if Clark comes down here…"

Jonathan shook his head, immediately returning his attention to her soft skin that burned against him. "Mmm."

"Twice in one day…" Martha trailed off, referring to the total sum of times Clark would have walked in on them had he come downstairs and found them.

"He's young," Jonathan responded, nibbling at her earlobe. "He'd recover quickly."

Martha's rational sensibility told her to protest, but when his hands began to roam and his lips ignited her skin in all the right places, she found herself stripped of all powers of reason. Fortunately for Clark, he slept straight through the night, and though when he woke in the morning he found his parents asleep and entangled on the living room covered by a wool blanket, all three of them were grateful he hadn't woken any earlier.

When she reported to work on Monday, Martha was reluctant to tell Lionel the truth when he inevitably asked her what the source of my troubles had been. She told him it was anxiety. He didn't believe her for a minute, of course. That night, Martha received the call from Dr. Baker, who had gotten the results of her blood tests back from the medical center. He was as astonished as she was -- she was pregnant.

She was going to tell Jonathan, but every time she built up to it emotionally, her mind would unexpectedly turn to thoughts of lust and they would end up doing…other things. Then Ryan reappeared and suddenly their lives became about him for a short while. Even after Ryan's tragic, untimely death, keeping the truth from her family had become second nature and Martha had gotten used to handling the reality of her situation on her own.

Shortly before the toxins from the meteor rocks in the storm cellar had landed her in the hospital, Jonathan had started to suspect. She had gained a little weight, and her body shape had changed a bit. Though her sex drive had been relegated back to normal, he began to notice the changes in her body. And that was when the morning sickness had started. Martha chalked it up to a stomach flu, and Jonathan spent days taking care of her before she finally learned to conceal her nausea from him.

One morning, she was caught with my guard down, hunched over the toilet. A bit baffled, he held her hair and later said, with a good-natured chuckle, "You know, if I didn't know better, I'd say you were pregnant." He immediately back peddled, apologizing for a remark that would have hurt her had she not actually been pregnant. As soon as he and Clark said they were leaving for the hardware store, she grabbed the jar of flour from underneath the sink and ran down to the storm cellar to find a more suitable hiding place for the spaceship key.

- -


End file.
